


Local Boy In The Photograph

by brentlordandsaviour



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Depression, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, and meanwhile franks dead, bits in the past and bits in the present, gerards a depressed alcoholic, inspired by a stereophonics song, its how gerards dealing, its on my wattpad if you want better formatting, theres some formatting errors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 07:35:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6648256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brentlordandsaviour/pseuds/brentlordandsaviour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He would always be twenty-three.<br/>But not Gerard, Gerard's long past twenty-three now, he's twenty-eight, and he needs to start living.</p><p>(Inspired by the Stereophonics song listen to it while you read)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Local Boy In The Photograph

Years go by, and it doesn't get any easier. The pain doesn't lessen. If anything, it only gets worse, as memories get old, and you begin to forget.

* * *

It was that time again, the one Gerard hated most. The whole year lead around to it; it was his new New Year, only it was a day filled with pain and regret rather than the joy and happiness that comes with New Year. However, it was filled with all of the same false hopes and promises. It was a day full of tears, for all different reasons, and a day full of forced smiles and small talk between distant relatives who only bothered to speak to each other on that day out of respect.

It was the fifth anniversary of the accident. Gerard was twenty eight, he should be happily married, living in his own home, with a stable job. Somehow, he managed to secure a shabby ground floor one bedroom apartment, probably something to do with the fact that an old friend of Frank's owned the building. That was about the only good thing in his life, and even that wasn't all that great. He spent most nights sitting in bars, talking to whoever was there. He had made an attempt at living a normal life, but he couldn't quite handle it; could you, if you saw what he had, happen to the person you love the most?

* * *

 

The headlines were all the same: 'Tragic Death Of Twenty-Three Year Old Frank Iero', along with a smiling picture of the man who died, all over the front of the local newspapers for around a month after it happened. Gerard was living on the floor in Frank's parent's front room, due to the guest rooms being taken up by immediate family. Gerard didn't want to leave them, and they didn't want Gerard to leave.

When the constant visitors got too much for him, he would go for a walk. Sometimes he'd venture in to town, and go to a crappy coffee shop down a side street and sit for an hour or two with his headphones in, blocking out the world. Other times, he'd go to the park, and sit on the bench where they had had their first conversation, after Frank's dog had peed on Gerard's shoes. They were nineteen then, and didn't have a care in the world. Frank was an aspiring guitarist, and Gerard an artist. They had a lot in common. It was like they were made for each other.

Wherever Gerard went, he would see the headlines in the shop windows. He would try to ignore the stares people gave as he walked past. He didn't eat, he didn't sleep, he didn't bother showering or changing his clothes, there was no point. There was no point in living when Frank couldn't any more. He tried not to listen to the people whispering around him, about the 'terrible accident'. It was no accident, Gerard knew that for certain. He had seen the mangled body, and he had found the hastily scrawled note. It was no accident. It was suicide.

* * *

 

His therapist told him it was depression; Gerard didn't believe him. He wasn't depressed, because that implied he had a problem. He didn't have a problem, or an illness, he was grieving. He had lost the one man he truly loved, and had to live with the guilt of knowing that, technically, he could have stopped it.

Gerard drank to forget. He didn't want to remember the way Frank's body lay across the tracks, the twenty three year old sprawled out and bloody, flattened by the train. Allegedly, the people on the platform tried to stop him from jumping in front of it, but it was no use, because this was what Frank wanted, and Gerard hated that Frank had been so unhappy, and he didn't do anything about it, not because he didn't want to, or couldn't be bothered- purely because he couldn't. Frank never told him just how unhappy he truly was.

* * *

 

"Gerard? Do you know train times for Monday? I was going to go to New York, have a lads day with a few old friends." This was not an uncommon thing for Frank to do; he had a much wider social circle than Gerard, and often left states for a few days at a time. Sometimes Gerard would be invited to, other times not. It didn't bother him when he wasn't. He trusted Frank not to go off and have any one night stands, but if he did, that was his choice, and not Gerard's. Gerard just hoped that Frank didn't betray his trust, and up until now, he was yet to be unfaithful.

Gerard emerged from their tiny kitchen holding two steaming mugs of coffee, and passed one over to Frank, who took a sip of the hot beverage before setting it down on the table, and facing his boyfriend, who was searching train times on his laptop.

"The earliest one is at 5:36 am, straight to NYC," Gerard replied, flashing Frank a wide grin. He knew there was no way that Frank would even think about getting out of bed at that time. The man needed his beauty sleep.

Frank giggled at the sight of his boyfriend's tiny teeth (he found them cute), and also the ridiculous idea that he would ever get on a train at that time in a morning. The only way he'd be up that early would be if he was going to Disneyland. He most definitely was not.

"Well, the earliest you'll probably get would be 10:48," Gerard continued. He was meeting up with some art school friends not long after that, so agreed to drop Frank off at the station.

* * *

 

He had only had two beers when he turned up at Frank's parent's front door. He was in his smartest clothes, a black suit which had been worn to countless interviews, a white shirt with a hole somewhere in the bottom, and a red tie which had once belonged to Frank. Gerard started wearing it because it still smelt like Frank, but after five years, it now smelt like alcohol and cigarette smoke. It smelt like Gerard.

It was Frank's mother who opened the door. She had been crying, her eyes were red and puffy. Gerard imagined that it wouldn't be easy, losing your child, especially not in the way she lost Frank. Perhaps if he had just confided in someone, and gotten some help, tonight would just be a normal night, there would be no tears and no awkward conversation. Perhaps that was why, when she noticed the change in Gerard's behaviour, she pushed him into seeing a psychiatrist. So he didn't up dead on the train tracks, like her only son.

She took one look at Gerard, his pale face, the dark circles around his eyes, made up partially of the eyeliner he kept reapplying but never taking off, and partially of the bags underneath them from five years of sleepless nights. The rare nights he did sleep, he was awoken by nightmares, about Frank and trains and death, and seeing his boyfriend's dead body. He wanted to drink. He wanted to forget.

She lead him in to the front room, and Gerard noticed that they had finally got rid of the hideous blue puke-stained (courtesy of hungover Gerard) carpet and replaced it with one that was green, and equally as hideous. It was the first time since the last anniversary of Frank's death that he had been inside the house. After he moved into his apartment, his visits became rare, the distance between them getting longer, until there was some unspoken agreement made that he would turn up on the anniversary, and that would be all.

Seemingly, he was the only person who was affected so badly, and was still hurting so badly. Mr Iero was sat in his chair, watching the news. Not the local news, which would probably be sharing a story about more bodies being found in the canal, followed by a quick announcement about Frank, but the national news, which held much more drastic stories, like another apparently foiled plan to blow up the White House.

Aunties and uncles and cousins and grandparents sat around the room, and they were all smiling and chatting and acting like today was a perfectly normal day; one like any other. It wasn't the day that they lost a family member. Gerard had no doubt that deep down they were feeling it, or so he hoped (not in a mean way, he just didn't want the knowledge that Frank's family were a bunch of heartless assholes). He could see the sadness in some of their eyes, he could see through the fake smiles. He knew who were closest to Frank. They seemed to be the saddest. Quite rightly, too.

* * *

 

It was the day of the funeral. Gerard wore the black suit he kept for 'special occasions', and a new black shirt, and a black tie he used to wear way back in his high school days. He had been changing in Mr and Mrs Iero's room, and before leaving, he looked up at the fan, and the tie in his hands, and thought about ending his life, there and then. But it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair on Frank, because this was his last day being whole, as such. Of course, his body was lifeless and mangled from the train, but he was still him, until he got cremated that afternoon, and then he would be nothing but a pile of ashes. 'Frank Iero' would physically be no more. He would be nothing more than a memory, a name which cropped up in conversation every now and again years in to the future, until all of the people who knew him had also died, and then he would be remembered by nobody, and all of his twenty three years of life would be for nothing.

It wasn't the first time Gerard had considered taking his own life. He had thought about it quite a lot, as a teenager, and even in the time he knew Frank, but in the fortnight since his boyfriend's death, it had crossed his mind more than once.

Afterwards, Gerard suffered what seemed like hours upon hours of painful conversation, with family members and old friends of Frank's that he had never even heard of. In reality was nothing more than maybe an hour, two at best. He wanted nothing more than to get away from them all, to get away from everything, and escape into his own world, or better still, escape into the past, and stop Frank from jumping in front of the oncoming train.

He wandered outside and sat down beneath a tree. He thought about all that had happened in the past fortnight.

He had been sat in the village hall with some art school friends, helping out with a summer club, when he got the call. A frantic voice- Frank's father- telling him to get to the train station, now, because Frank was hurt badly. Gerard already had an idea that he would find his boyfriend on the tracks, but he tried to push the terrible thought out of his mind as he fought through the hectic lunchtime traffic.

He arrived at the station and was greeted with a crowd of people, and a couple of emergency services vehicles. He pushed his way through the crowd, and was stopped by a police officer when he tried to enter, telling him that there had been an accident. Of course, Gerard knew that, and he tried to explain that he was the boyfriend, but the officer still refused to let him in until Mr Iero came and found him. He looked shocked and scared and sad, but Gerard knew he hadn't cried.

That was what Mrs Iero was doing when Gerard passed her on the platform, sat curled up against a wall in hysterics, a paramedic trying desperately to get her to calm down and just breathe. There were five more on the tracks, bent over something, which Gerard assumed was Frank. He assumed right.

Upon getting back to Frank's parents house that night, Mrs Iero went straight up to bed, Mr Iero left straight away and went to the pub, and Gerard went in to Frank's old room. He rifled through the drawers, not in a rude way, but purely out of curiosity. The top drawer of his desk was jammed shut; it took Gerard pulling it with all of his strength to open it.

Inside was a gun. The gun was not alone. There were many different types of pills, a half empty bottle of vodka and some razor blades. 'Suicide drawer,' Gerard thought aloud, and laughed at his little joke, which was not a joke at all. It was sad, it really was, that this had evidently been Frank's intention before he knew Gerard.

He had been here the previous night, having dinner with his parents, as he did every Sunday. Gerard chose not to join him this week, deciding he needed to do some artwork instead. He had been lacking inspiration recently, but decided to do a portrait of Frank as a surprise for him. It was a surprise he wouldn't be needing now.

Gerard emptied the contents of the drawer out on to the bed, which still had on Frank's old Star Wars bed linen. He doubted it would ever be changed now, it would stay as Frank's fifteen-year-old nerd kid room. When Gerard was fifteen, he would have loved it, in fact Gerard's old room back at his own parent's house wasn't much different. Posters of bands and horror movies lined the walls, and a guitar sat, dusty on it's stand, in the corner of the room.

Gerard took the top off the bottle of vodka, and downed what remained in the bottle. He didn't bother with the pills, just picked up the gun. He pressed it to his forehead. He could kill himself, right there in Frank's room. They could be together again in no time. They could be happy in the next life, wherever that might be. At least, that was Gerard's intention when he pulled the trigger, and he assumed that the gun had fired. he felt nothing. Maybe he had died, and just couldn't feel the pain. But, he pulled the gun away, and set it back down beside him, and he was most definitely still alive. He ran his fingers over his head, checking for a bullet hole, and there wasn't one. He was alive. The gun was empty.

He laid back, and as he put his head on the pillow, he felt the crunch of paper. He lifted the pillow, and, just as he expected, there was what seemed to be a letter, written in Frank's almost illegible scrawl.

"Whoever finds this,  
You are reading this. Hopefully that means I'm dead.  
Sorry.  
Mom, dad, if it makes you feel any better about losing your son, you couldn't have done anything. I was past the point of fixing.  
Gerard, sorry for lying to you. I loved you, I will always love you, but I can't help but doubt whether you still love me, and whether you will always love me. I hope you don't see my body. I don't want you to be in that much pain. Please don't stop living because of me. Live for the both of us. Get yourself a job, get yourself a decent apartment, not our tiny little thing. Most of all, move on. Get yourself another partner. I'm worthless, Gerard. I'm nothing.  
My death is meaningless. It's nothing to do with being a statistic for gay suicides. It's just the fact that I am miserable. I will never be truly happy here.   
I'm sorry.  
Love,  
Frank xo"

* * *

 

"Gerard?" Mrs Iero was growing increasingly concerned; he had been staring into space, unresponsive, for the past quarter hour. It used to happen a lot, after Frank's death, and nothing ever came of it, eventually he would just snap back into reality and continue his existence. It could hardly be called living. It wasn't living.

But, as Gerard wiped his eyes, he smiled, and managed somehow to work up a conversation.

Just like Frank, he didn't want to become another statistic.

His boyfriend would always be twenty three, no matter how many birthdays pass. But not Gerard, he was twenty eight, and on his next birthday he would be twenty nine, and then thirty. He was still young, but growing older every second. Luckily for him, it was not too late to end the fact that he was merely existing, just another specimen left to roam the earth, just another statistic. He didn't want his name, and his memories, to die out within the next generation. He wanted children and grandchildren, he wanted a reason to be remembered. And, for that, he had to stop existing, and start living.

 


End file.
